This is the very last time I’ll be haranguing you about the scienceblogs fundraiser for schools—I’ve reached my goal of $2000 and doubled it! Reaching that goal was not enough to fund all of the projects, though, and there are four remaining that could use additional donations.

• How can you resist this title? Evolution Is Science (fund this one) is a project looking to purchase replica hominid skulls for teaching low income kids in Chicago about evolution.
• Here’s another one I like: Real Specimens for Marine Science (fund this one). A Brooklyn school is looking to purchase aquaria and invertebrate specimens so kids can see what real animals are like.
• This one aims low, but you’ve got to appreciate how desperate they must be. Essential Supplies for Biology and AP Biology Classrooms (fund this one)is looking for something very basic for low income kids in LA: colored paper and pads.
• You can’t turn down a library! Science Books for Enloe Students (fund this one) is a project to replace old books in health and life sciences at a Raleigh, NC school library.

If those projects don’t appeal to you, click on over to Evolgen (challenge),

Island of Doubt (challenge),

Neurotopia (challenge), or

The Questionable Authority (challenge), who all also have challenges that haven’t been met yet.

I won’t be pestering you again, so this is your last chance; I have to admit that the generous readers of Pharyngula dug deeper than expected, and I don’t want to impose further. Thanks again!

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IMPORTANT ADDITION: I’m sorry to say that DonorsChoose only accepts donations from Americans, so if you’re Canadian or European or Australian or Brazilian, you (and by that I mean “we”) are out of luck. It seems to me that they’re missing out on a golden opportunity: if they advertised this as a chance to improve US education, the money would come pouring in from all over the world. People respond well to the need to help the less fortunate overcome calamity.

Via Coturnix, here’s an extremely depressing resignation letter from a public school teacher. I’ve seen this kind of thing a few times now: our problem is that the public schools are being treated as little factories, where you push kindergarten kids in at one end, and a dozen years later an adult with an education pops out. A high school diploma is regarded as an entitlement rather than an earned acknowledgment of ability, and what that means is that administrators tend to lower their standards and be extremely lenient about the behavior and skills of both students and faculty. Even where there are great teachers and first-rate students, they are getting swamped in the rising tide of permitted nonsense.

After all, if all the voting public cares about is your graduation rate, it’s easy to keep that high: just hand out diplomas to kids for showing up.

I’m a bit stunned, people. I set up my DonorsChoose challenge to raise money for teachers with a goal of $2000, and we gave ourselves two weeks to raise that much. It’s the second day of the fundraiser, and my readers have contributed $3,967.80, and fully funded 7 of the 12 proposals. Seriously, I’m feeling a bit like Dr Evil; I put my pinkie finger to the corner of my mouth, asked for the huge sum of two thousand dollars, and laughed maniacally at my arrogance…and you people shrugged your shoulders and just came through with the cash. I am impressed.

Thank you all very much.

If anyone else wants to contribute, there are still underfunded proposals, and Janet has been our central coordinator, and has a list of other challenges through the Seed scienceblogs consortium.

The scienceblogs crew is pushing a new charity for the next few weeks: an outfit called DonorsChoose, which collects funding requests from teachers and tries to match them up with people willing to pass along a few dollars. They have a long, long list of teachers looking for help in their classrooms; what we sciencebloggers have done is picked a subset of the requests that each of us like and grouped them into a challenge. My challenge contains a dozen science-related requests, and now my job is to beg you, the readers of Pharyngula, to take a look at them and if you can, kick in a few dollars to help them out.

If you look to the sidebar on the left, you’ll see a status bar showing how close we are to funding those requests. It’s at a pathetic 0% right now, but it would be nice to see it fill up.

I said that a lot of us here at scienceblogs are doing this; Janet has a complete list, so if you’d rather help out one of the other blogs meet their goal, please do. All that matters is that teachers get help, not which of us helps out.

Also, there will be a random drawing at the end of our efforts, and donors have a chance of winning various small tchotchkes. Again, Janet has the details, including the list of fabulous prizes.

…knowing that I’ve got Michael Bérubé defending academic freedom. I would dearly love to see him face-to-face with Horowitz, I think.

Here’s another sad story of hysteria used to water down science teaching. David Lapp does a simple and dramatic exercise, the ballistic pendulum experiment: fire a bullet into a block of wood, and from the masses of the two objects and the movement of wood, calculate the velocity of the bullet. That sounds pretty cool to me, and seems like a clever and dramatic way to get students to see the utility of simple math. Now, though, people are practically shrieking penal codes at the poor guy and whining about the terrible example he is setting, putting those poor school kids in danger.

“It’s just absolute madness, from my point of view,” said Feinberg, one of the founding members of the National Emergency Assistance Team, which has responded to most of the school shootings in the country. “It is not only crazy in concept, in light of the world we live in it is absolutely irresponsible.”

Guns are common objects, and a lot of the kids probably have at least one in their household. A lot of those kids have probably been out shooting: they have held a gun near their face, aimed it in the direction of a target, and pulled the trigger. They may have gone hunting with a parent, a situation far, far riskier than the controlled setting of a classroom. Mr Feinberg has no control over what they experience outside the school, and seems to have no idea of what those kids are doing in real life anyway. The virtue of this exercise is that it takes something familiar and uses it to reveal the mathematics of matter and motion.

The phrase that bugs me is “in light of the world we live in”—what world is that? One where if a teacher uses a gun responsibly as a tool, kids will be inspired to…what? Learn physics? What “irresponsible” lesson does Mr Feinberg think was taught?